Story 1
The Night Dispensary
The dispensary on Jalan Hujan is the only shop on the street that never closes, and Madam Seng Bee Lian is the reason. She is sixty-seven years old, she has held a pharmacist's licence for forty-one of those years, and she keeps the night counter herself because, as she tells anyone who asks, the day has plenty of people in white coats and the night has almost none.
Behind the counter, next to the computer she uses for the records and the digital balance she uses for the law, sits a small brass scale that belonged to her grandfather. Two pans, a needle, a row of little weights in a velvet drawer. It has not been used for medicine since before she was born. She keeps it polished. She tells customers it is decoration.
It is not decoration.
Madam Seng discovered the scale's true work on her third night shift, four decades ago, when a man laid his clenched fist on the counter and could not say what he needed. Without thinking she had touched the back of his hand, and he had opened it, and there was nothing in it, and the empty nothing had somehow ended up on the left-hand pan, and the needle had moved. Eleven grams. She has learned the units since. Worry weighs light and fidgety, the needle trembling. Grief weighs slow. Fear weighs heaviest of all, and the fresher it is, the heavier, which is the opposite of how it works with fish.
